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Ask HN: For help: Gmail is filtering our URLs

12 points by e79 ↗ HN
The gmail.com client normally renders the hyperlinks in our outgoing email just fine. Yesterday morning, this suddenly stopped happening and users were sent links that could not be clicked in their transactional emails from us. I was able to reproduce it by simply including our domain name in an e-mail, which leads me to believe e-mails are being filtered for our domain name specifically. I've reproduced this across multiple Gmail accounts of ours, and all hyperlinking is always fine right until I include our domain name anywhere in an e-mail. Viewing page source shows that gmail.com is employing some HTML to break our URL up so it doesn't turn into a valid hyperlink.

I suspect this is some sort of anti-spam measure. Has anybody else experienced this? I am asking Hacker News for help because there doesn't appear to be any way to get in contact with Google regarding gmail problems. We've already employed everything in their FAQs about avoiding their spam filters. We use DKIM and have a healthy standing with all email blacklists. I'm really not sure what other options we have left.

7 comments

[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 29.9 ms ] thread
ChristianBundy
Is your domain name fetlife.com?
e79
Yes. (Site is NSFW, by the way)
e79
Someone e-mailed me to let me know that a discussion forum they post on has run into the same issue. Seems like we are not the only one...
dangrossman
Use a link shortener (perhaps buy a domain of your own for it) to avoid linking to your domain?
Someone1234
Link shorteners are pretty heavily penalised in email since spammers use the same trick to bypass the same filters.
therealmarv
I've found out what is reason for this! It only affects text mails: Gmail is analyzing the links in text mails and when it is adult content it refuses to make them clickable! For me this is censorship. I'm an adult and I can decide myself what I want to see and what not. I do not want Google to filter out adult links (categorize them!) and make them not clickable!

Solution: Make HTML Emails

e79
From something I posted on our site:

From my experience, unless a change in a Google product degrades functionality for a large portion of end users they aren't going to publicly acknowledge it. They don't seem to have the same policies regarding transparency that other companies like FetLife do (we acknowledge when we mess up and break stuff!).

When ReCAPTCHA went down last year I looked and could not find any acknowledgement of the issue from a Google employee. This was while FetLife and other large websites tweeted about it and posted in Google's product forum. All we had to go with was speculation and helping each other out with recommendations for temporary solutions.

Likewise, this change in Gmail may never be officially acknowledged. It may be related to the arrival of Google's new Inbox product or it may be related to some sort of spam filtering they deployed into production. It doesn't appear to be specific to adult websites. Other large community websites are affected too. The result is that affected websites using plain text emails are now forced to switch over to HTML-based email. I could see a conspiracy theory in there about Google pushing HTML-based email for a nicer looking Gmail/Inbox experience. No matter what, I think it's very unlikely we'll ever know what change caused this or why.